Gives Light(Gives Light Series) (4 page)

I smiled after him as the three of them departed; one of the men gave me a stiff but polite nod.

Granny came trudging out of the kitchen and sat down at her loom.  "From now on," she said, "you will fetch my parcels for me.  I won't have the Takes Flight boys coming out all this way when you're perfectly capable of making the trip on your own."

I nodded, but I really wanted to ask why they were making deliveries in the rain.  Didn't they worry about getting sick?  Or maybe that wasn't a risk when you knew the land and its climate as well as they did.  Dad never liked to talk about his childhood, but on the off occasion that he mentioned it, I envied him his experiences with wild animals and rough terrain, the home remedies he knew by heart.  He could have been exaggerating, but when you're seven, that's not really your first thought.

"Don't you have something you should be doing?"

Getting out of here, I thought.  But the more I considered it, the more childish I felt.  Officer Hargrove had made it clear that I was still a child as far as the law was concerned.  What right did I have to complain?  It wasn't like I was in any danger...just severe discomfort.  Granny could use some help around the house.  If I could fetch deliveries for her, if I could light the hearth for her at night and draw her a bath in the morning...  She was so tiny and frail.  And the windows needed to be washed pretty badly. 

And that's exactly what I spent the rainy morning doing--washing the windows, I mean.  Granny would occasionally look up from her loom--initially with surprise, I thought--and offer input: "Some
vinegar
would help..."  Or, "Not like that!  You'll leave streaks!"  I know I was pretty inept.  Like I've said, Dad and I were slobs.  Granny's coaching ultimately got me through the grimy task.  I even thought I saw her smile, once, behind her heddle rod.

I was finished by afternoon, and the rain had dwindled to a drizzle.  Granny waved her hand at me and went to her room for a nap.  Feeling restless again, I thought I'd visit the Little Hawk house.

A man was standing outside of the house and gutting fish on a folding table, the stench nauseating.  He looked up as I approached.  He frowned, though he never met my eyes.  He had a long face, his brown hair streaked with gray.

I tried waving to him, but he pretended he hadn't seen me.

The front door swung open and Annie came bounding outside, her long hair flying freely behind her.

"There you are!"

I spoke to your secret admirer
, I signed; she looked puzzled for a moment but passed it over, snatching up my arm.

"I'm making stew," Annie said, "in case the rain stops by evening.  All it really needs to do is sit there and simmer.  Shall we go inside?"

"Annie," said the man, still not looking our way. 

There must have been an implicit warning in his voice that I hadn't heard; Annie bristled.  "I'm not allowed to have friends, then?"

I waved my hands quickly.  I didn't want her arguing with her father.  Anyway, I was pretty sure that most dads wouldn't be too keen on their teenage daughters spending time alone with boys.

Annie sighed, defeated.  "I'll see you tonight, then," she said to me.  She shot a dark look at her father's bowed head.  "
Hopefully
."

Now I
really
didn't know what to do with myself.  Dispirited, but resigned, I decided to go for a walk.

The reservation really did dwarf the size of my former neighborhood, but as far as I could tell, its community, though widespread, was smaller.  There weren't any roads proper; just two lanes, one for the farms out west and the other for the woods out east.  I guessed there had to be a lake somewhere.  Bull pines and oaks grew side-by-side, the pines considerably more numerous.  The oaks would lose their leaves in winter; the pines would stay green all year long.

My legs carried me north.  Next thing I knew I was standing in front of a house that bore the unmistakable look of years of abandonment and neglect.  There were vines tangling up one side, the windows beneath the roof eaves opaque with dust.  Empty planters hung beneath the windows, their edges crumbled, like termites had had their way with them.   A worn little gate blocked off a segment of smooth earth that had once been a garden--but for flowers or vegetables, I didn't know.  I didn't remember.  This was my home.  This had been my home.  The name "St. Clair" still hung beside the door, partially obscured by a crosshatch of spiderwebs.

It must have been muscle memory that brought me here.  I don't know.  They say there are things your body remembers years and years after your mind's forgotten them.

All the wind left my lungs, like I'd been punched in the gut.  I wiped wet hair out of my eyes.  I don't even know how long I stood outside that house before suddenly, impulsively--which really isn't like me--I pulled open the door.

It swung open with ease, none of the resistance I had expected from the aged and swollen wood.  I didn't realize at the time how suspicious that was.

The air in the front room was musty and thick.  Gray sunlight and warm rain leaked through chips in the ceiling.  It was a one story home.  I hadn't really thought about this house over the years--there were certain things I'd grown skilled at removing from my memory--but it struck me as familiar in a distant, cursory way.  The closet next to the front door.  The raw support beam that might have become another room had our time here not been cut short.  The twin bedrooms off to one side and the back door to the outhouse.  An alcove where maybe, I thought, I had sat on Mom's lap, and together we had watched the sunrise climb over the pines.

Absence seemed to me such a heavy thing, especially absence of memory.  I hated that I couldn't remember Mom's face.  There were half-memories of soft touches I thought I could attribute to her, but I wasn't at all certain that I hadn't imagined them.  Mom was gone before I'd even had the chance to know her...  And now Dad.  Where was he?  Was he safe?  Was he alive?  Dad was a lot more than just a dad; he was my best friend.  He was all that I had.  I thought I was going insane.  My chest was tight and cold and I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs and I couldn't.  I couldn't make a sound.

Frustrated, scared, my eyes misted over.  I slammed my fist into the dirty wall.  The surface layer of wood crumbled beneath my knuckles.  I swore soundlessly, rubbing my fist.

Something had fallen to the floor.

I paused.  I knelt in the dark and detritus, running my fingers through years of filth.

I jolted when I felt fresh paper beneath my fingertips.

I scooped up the paper.  I stood quickly and went into the alcove, squinting in the dim daylight.

It was a drawing, notably devoid of the dust covering the rest of the house.  I ran my fingers across the neat gray lines.  Smoother than graphite; a charcoal drawing.  A drawing of a slender woman, her fair, curly hair bunched back in an unruly ponytail.  Her eyelashes were sweeping, her head and neck bowed, like she was tending to a garden or picking up something on the floor.

My vision blurred.  I wiped my eyes hastily with the back of my hand and drew a deep, unsteady breath.  I looked absently around the house, trying to dispel my thoughts.

The walls were covered in drawings.

I wouldn't be surprised if my heart had stopped just then.  I drank in the drawings with yearning; familial scenes reimagined, mother and father with their infant, husband and wife on their wedding day.  I thought they were all by the same hand, but I couldn't be sure.  There was a tremendous amount of anatomical accuracy, but some of the details were wrong, my father missing his paunchy stomach and wobbly chin.  And then it occurred to me:  Dad might not have had the excess weight when he was young.  It was eleven years since the last time Granny had seen him.  Granny must have made these drawings.  It seemed like the sort of thing she would do covertly.

A floorboard creaked on the far side of the room.

My head shot up on my shoulders.  I stared at the raw support beam, my pulse sounding loudly in my ears.  I swore I saw something moving amid the shadows.

An unsettling, artificial silence diffused the air.  I wanted to call out,
Who's there?
  At the same time I didn't.  What if it was a wild animal?  No, that didn't make sense.  How would an animal have got in here when all the doors were closed?

For a long time, the only sound was of the rain drizzling through the cracks in the ceiling.  I wanted to make it clear:  I wasn't moving.  This was my house, all the heartache and ruin that went with it.  I was not the intruder here.  This was the only place on the reservation that I wasn't intruding.

Finally he stepped out from behind the beam.

He was hulking, his jeans torn at the knee.  His hair looked more tangled and braided than it had the night before.  Annie had said he hated everyone equally, but the hatred in his eyes, the eyes on mine, looked unparalleled.

I had a distinctly unfunny thought just then.  Rafael's dad had killed my mom in this house.  Maybe Rafael would kill me in this house. 

"You gonna put it back, or what?"

I stared.  He meant the drawing.  There was spirit gum on the back of the paper.

I folded up the drawing and stuck it in my front pocket.

I don't think I managed to keep the suspicion out of my gaze, though it wasn't exactly my idea to make Rafael uncomfortable.  I couldn't take my eyes off of him, much in the same way that you can't look away from a train wreck, or a burning forest.  I half expected him to hit me.  But no; he went on looking at me, eyes dark and intense.

He moved past me, toward the door.  He was gone in seconds.

I didn't know what to make of the encounter.  I was still thinking about it at dinner that night, sitting on Granny's porch, when the rain had stopped, the grounds dewy and damp, when Granny nodded off in the middle of a story about a spider who wove the webs of fate and Annie chased a little boy I took to be her brother around the bonfire.

It wasn't until much later, when I was already in bed, that I realized where Rafael had sat during dinner.  On the wet ground by the bonfire, embers illuminating his hands and face.  A notebook on his lap and a piece of charcoal in his hand.

I had worn my day clothes to bed; I didn't own a proper pair of pajamas.  I reached into my pants pocket and unfolded the charcoal drawing.  The spirit gum had dried up.  I laid the drawing on the table next to Dad's bed, the moonlight through the window casting it in radiance; I ran my fingers along the curves of Mom's face, a distant wolf baying in the woods, his mournful song echoing in my ears.

I wasn't the only boy whose life had changed eleven years ago.

4

Lottery

I wound up with a cold.  I've never fared very well in the rain.  Granny tutted over me for the next few days, exasperated, and fed me extremely strong draughts of peppermint tea.  Peppermint tea, I learned, was the locals' secret:  You drink it before you go out in the chilly weather and it boosts your immune system.  That explained Aubrey's deliveries in the rain.  Unfortunately, it tasted like absolute junk, but I didn't want to hurt Granny's feelings and pretended to enjoy it.

I was feeling much better by Sunday, which turned out to be a day of rest--by which I mean Granny made me comb my curly hair, no easy task, and we went arm-in-arm to the little church next to the schoolhouse, Granny leaning heavily on my shoulder.  I guess church is something the white settlers brought over from Europe.  Only the very oldest members of the tribe attended, and it was a bizarrely eclectic mix of Christian parables and Native creationism allegories.  I didn't understand it much, but Granny came out of the service looking energetic and rejuvenated.  The glow on her face, I thought, made it worthwhile.

We received a surprise visit that afternoon from Officer Hargrove.

"Everything alright?" she said, looking more harrowed than ever.  "Skylar, a word, please..."

I went with her outside the house; we stood by the sundial and she promptly forced a pen and notepad into my hands.

"Skylar," she said.  I had been hopeful, up until now, that maybe she'd found my father at last, but my uncertainty resurfaced at her next words:  "Where does your father work?"

I bit my lip.  This was a rare question, because I actually knew the answer.

"Skylar--"  I didn't like how much she was saying my name.  "Your father's never filed taxes.  We can't find him if he doesn't exist."

I penned a brief reply. 
I don't know.

"You're lying," Officer Hargrove said, sounding angrier than I'd ever heard her.  I guess she wasn't looking at a six-year-old anymore.  "Do you want him to be found or not?  Why are you all so tight-lipped about this?"

I
did
want him to be found, more than anything.  I just didn't know whether he'd forgive me for ratting him out.

I decided I'd rather have him angry at me than dead.

He's a coyote
, I wrote.

Officer Hargrove took the notepad from me.  She looked at it for a long time.

"A coyote," she said.

Dad smuggled people into the country who maybe didn't belong here, or maybe they did--that's not my place to say.  I'd never gone with him on those excursions, but they'd always sounded dangerous in his recounts.